Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts (3 page)

At first, Blake, who had no background in science, thought his friend was joking. But when he discovered that Gong and other scientists were already fiddling with fish, he realized that the idea wasn’t far-fetched at all. Blake and Crockett wouldn’t even need to invent a new organism—they’d just need to take the shimmering schools of transgenic fish out of the lab and into our home tanks.

The pair founded Yorktown Technologies to do just that, and Blake took the lead during the firm’s early years, setting up shop in Austin, Texas. He licensed the rights to produce the fish from Gong’s lab and hired two commercial fish farms to breed the pets. (Since the animals pass their fluorescence genes on to their offspring, all Blake needed to create an entire line of neon pets was a few starter adults.) He and his partner dubbed them GloFish, though the animals aren’t technically glow-in-the-dark—at least, not the same way that a set of solar system stickers in a child’s bedroom might be. Those stickers, and most other glow-in-the-dark toys, work through a scientific property known as phosphorescence. They absorb and store light, reemitting it gradually over time, as a soft glow that’s visible when you turn out all the lights. GloFish, on the other hand, are fluorescent, which means that they absorb light from the environment and beam it back out into the world immediately. The fish appear to glow in a dark room if they’re under a blue or black light, but they can’t store light for later—turn the artificial light off, and the fish stop shining.

Blake was optimistic about their prospects. As he explains, “The ornamental fish industry is about new and different and exciting varieties of fish.” And if new, different, and exciting is what you’re after, what more could you ask for than an animal engineered to glow electric red, orange, green, blue, or purple thanks to a dab of foreign DNA? Pets are products, after all, subject to the same marketplace forces as toys or clothes. Whether it’s a puppy or a pair of heels, we’re constantly searching for the next big thing. Consider the recent enthusiasm for “teacup pigs”—tiny swine cute enough to make you swear off pork chops forever.

Harold Herzog, a psychologist at Western Carolina University who specializes in human-animal interactions, has studied the way our taste in animals changes over time. When Herzog consulted the registry of the American Kennel Club, he found that dog breed choices fade in and out of fashion the same way that baby names do. One minute, everyone is buying Irish setters, naming their daughters Heather, and listening to “Bennie and the Jets”—welcome to 1974!—and then it’s on to the next great trend. Herzog discovered that between 1946 and 2003, eight breeds—Afghan hounds, chow chows, Dalmatians, Dobermans, Great Danes, Old English sheepdogs, rottweilers, and Irish setters—went through particularly pronounced boom and bust cycles. Registrations for these canines would skyrocket, and then, as soon as they reached a certain threshold of popularity, people would begin searching for the next fur-covered fad.

Herzog identified a modern manifestation of our long-standing interest in new and unusual animals. In antiquity, explorers hunted for far-flung exotic species, which royal households often imported and displayed. Even the humble goldfish began as a luxury for the privileged classes. Native to Central and East Asia, the wild fish are usually covered in silvery gray scales. But ancient Chinese mariners had noticed the occasional yellow or orange variant wriggling in the water. Rich and powerful Chinese families collected these mutants in private ponds, and by the thirteenth century, fish keepers were breeding these dazzlers together. Goldfish domestication was born, and the once-peculiar golden fish gradually spread to the homes of less-fortunate Chinese families—and households elsewhere in Asia, Europe, and beyond.

As goldfish grew in popularity, breeders stepped up their game, creating ever more unusual varieties. Using artificial selection, they created goldfish with freakish and fantastical features, and the world’s aquariums now contain the fantail, the veiltail, the butterfly tail, the lionhead, the goosehead, the golden helmet, the golden saddle, the bubble eye, the telescope eye, the seven stars, the stork’s pearl, the pearlscale, the black moor, the panda moor, the celestial, and the comet goldfish, among others. This explosion of types was driven by the desire for the exotic and exquisite—urges that we can now satisfy with genetically modified pets.

We can also use genetic engineering to create animals that appeal to our aesthetic sensibilities, such as our preference for brightly colored creatures. For instance, a 2007 study revealed that we prefer penguin species that have a splash of yellow or red on their bodies to those that are simply black and white. We’ve bred canaries, which are naturally a dull yellow, to exhibit fifty different color patterns. And before GloFish were even a neon glint in Blake’s eye, pet stores were selling “painted” fish that had been injected with simple fluorescent dyes. With fluorescence
genes
, we can make a true rainbow of bright and beautiful pets.
*

Engineered pets also fit right into our era of personalization. We can have perfume, granola, and Nikes customized to our individual specifications—why not design our own pets? Consider the recent rise of designer dogs, which began with the Labradoodle, a cross between a Labrador retriever and a standard poodle. Though there’s no telling when the first Lab found himself fancying the well-groomed poodle down the street, most accounts trace the origin of the modern Labradoodle to Wally Conron, the breeding director of the Royal Guide Dog Association of Australia. In the 1980s, Conron heard from a blind woman in Hawaii, who wanted a guide dog that wouldn’t aggravate her husband’s allergies. Conron’s solution was to breed a Lab, a traditional seeing-eye dog, with a poodle, which has hypoallergenic hair. Other breeders followed Conron’s lead, arranging their own mixed-breed marriages. The dogs were advertised as providing families with the best of both worlds—the playful eagerness of a Lab with the smarts and hypoallergenic coat of the poodle. The rest, as they say, is history. The streets are now chock-full of newfangled canine concoctions: puggles (a pug-beagle cross), dorgis (dachshund plus corgi), and cockapoos (a cocker spaniel–miniature poodle mix). There’s even a mini Labradoodle for doodle lovers without lots of space.

Tweaking the genomes of our companions allows us to create a pet that fulfills virtually any desire—some practical, some decidedly not. When I set out to get a dog, I thought I had settled on the Cavalier King Charles spaniel: small, soft, and bred for companionship. Then I discovered a breeder who was crossing Cavaliers with miniature poodles, yielding the so-called Cavapoo. I was sold. I loved the scruffier, shaggier hair of the Cavapoo, and given what I knew about biology, I figured that a hybrid was less likely to inherit one of the diseases that plague perilously inbred canines. A dog that didn’t shed would be an added bonus. Plus, poodles have a reputation for being brainy, and I’m an overachiever; if I was going to get a dog, I wanted to be damn sure he’d be the valedictorian of his puppy kindergarten class.

The hitch: Even the most careful selective breeding is a rough science. Sure, Labs are friendly and poodles are intelligent, but just letting them go at it doesn’t guarantee that their puppies will exhibit the best of both breeds. Milo, the Cavapoo I eventually brought home, looks almost entirely like a spaniel, and as for a nonshedding coat, his health, and those famous poodle smarts? Well, my couch is covered with dog hair, Milo has a knee problem common in purebred Cavaliers, and I’m pretty sure he got the spaniel brain. So much for my plan to outsmart nature.

When I’m ready for my next pet, the landscape could be radically different. Social Technologies, a trend forecasting firm in Washington, D.C., issued a report on the commercial prospects for genetically modified pets. “Through advances in genetic modification,” the report said, “biotechnology labs could join kennels and animal shelters as a source for the perfect pet … Initially a luxury, pet personalization would become available to the general public as the technologies involved become more mature.”

Indeed, why bother creating clumsy crosses when we can edit genes directly? A company called Felix Pets, for example, is attempting to engineer cats that are missing a gene called
Fel d 1
, which codes for a protein that triggers human allergies.
*
And that’s just the beginning. What if you could order up a fish created in your alma mater’s trademark palette or dogs and cats with custom patterns on their coats? Or there’s the ultimate designer pet, proposed by Alan Beck, director of Purdue’s Center for the Human-Animal Bond: “If we’re going to come up with genetically engineered animals, we might be able to come up with an animal that loves only you.”

Transgenic pets will have to clear some hurdles before they make it to market. The Food and Drug Administration considers a new gene that is added to an organism to be a “drug,” and regulates altered animals under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Companies seeking approval to sell an engineered animal must demonstrate that the transgene has no ill effects on the animal itself. If the animal will be a source of food, companies must also demonstrate that it is safe for human consumption.

Regulators also evaluate how a genetically modified organism might affect the environment if it happened to make its way into the wild. Escape has been a concern since the first genetically engineered bacteria were created in the early 1970s. The scientists of that era worried about what might happen if they inadvertently created a dangerous superbug and it slipped out under the laboratory door. Biologists convened twice—at the Asilomar conferences of 1973 and 1975—to discuss these risks. In 1975, they drew up a document that encouraged their colleagues to exercise caution and use “biological and physical barriers” to ensure that novel organisms didn’t break free from the lab. The National Institutes of Health issued guidelines stipulating such safeguards in 1976 and has periodically updated its recommendations over the years.

Though these containment strategies are now routine, they aren’t foolproof, and ecologists continue to worry about engineered organisms ending up in the wild. Altered animals could “pollute” the gene pool by breeding with their free-range cousins, or snatch food and resources away from native organisms. In theory, laboratory manipulation could make a fish more likely to thrive in the big, wide world, and such Frankenfish could take over natural waterways, to the detriment of other species.

This very possibility has been part of the high-profile debate over the most famous (or infamous) transgenic fish: a fast-growing Atlantic salmon that AquaBounty, a Massachusetts firm, is trying to bring to market in the United States. Atlantic salmon normally produce growth hormone only in the summer, but the AquAdvantage fish have been engineered to crank out the hormone no matter what the season. The secret is a bit of biological code borrowed from the ocean pout, an eel-like fish that lives in frigid water. To keep its cellular machinery from icing over, the slithery fish produces its own antifreeze. The pout’s antifreeze gene is normally attached to a sequence of regulatory DNA called a “promoter.” Icy temperatures activate the promoter, which turns the gene on, triggering the ocean pout to start cranking out the antifreeze. The cold-sensitive promoter, however, can be attached to all sorts of different genes, and to create the AquAdvantage fish, scientists linked the promoter to a growth-hormone gene taken from the Chinook salmon. Then they slipped the entire construct into Atlantic salmon. As a result, in these salmon, cold temperatures prompt the production of growth hormone, and the fish reach their adult sizes faster than their unaltered counterparts. The genetic modification shaves a year and a half off the time between when a salmon hatches and when it’s ready to garnish your bagel.

It’s a clever bit of biological reprogramming, but AquaBounty has attracted vocal critics, many of whom fear that if the big bruisers from the lab escape, they could wreak havoc on wild salmon populations. To address these concerns—and reassure nervous regulators—AquaBounty is building several security measures into its production plans. It will breed fish in a secure facility in Canada and then raise the young in confined tanks situated in the highlands of Panama, far from their natural marine environment. The company also plans to produce only sterile female fish—incapable of passing their genes on even if they did somehow end up on the lam.

Though many scientists have concluded that there is little risk of the supersalmon escaping and staging some sort of wild coup, AquaBounty is still trying to win over regulators. The company first approached the FDA about its fish in 1993, and applied for formal approval in 1995. Despite deciding that the fish are low risk, the FDA has not yet ruled on whether they will be allowed on the market. (If the salmon are approved, they would become the first GM animal to officially enter the world’s food supply.)

*   *   *

As Alan Blake prepared to bring GloFish to market, he studied the regulatory challenges that have hobbled AquaBounty. Blake wasn’t sure what federal agencies would do about genetically modified
pets
, but he didn’t want to take any chances, so he began calling government officials and asking whether they’d have concerns about GloFish. He told regulators that the fish were designed to be companions, not food, and reassured them that scientists believed the animals posed a negligible risk to the environment. Wild zebrafish, he told them, spend their time in the tropics, not the chilly waters of North America. Conventional zebrafish have been sold as pets in the United States for decades, and they have never been able to survive an aquarium jailbreak long enough to establish a wild population. The water is simply too cold, and the fluorescent varieties are even less likely to make a go of it—the data suggest that GloFish are more sensitive to cold temperatures, less successful at reproducing, and, one suspects, more visible to predators, with their big, neon
EAT ME
signs.

Of course, there is no such thing as zero risk, but Perry Hackett, a geneticist who studies zebrafish at the University of Minnesota, puts the danger posed by GloFish this way: “What are the odds that all the air molecules will rush up into a corner of the room you’re sitting in and you’ll suffocate? That for whatever reason, just at random, they all happen to collect just in one corner?” Such a scenario is theoretically possible, but it’s so unlikely that we don’t worry about it. As Hackett says, “We don’t sit around with oxygen tanks by our desks.”